I'm going to read them

Jaroslav Seifert

WHAT I’M READING: The collection Seifert chose to justify his winning the Nobel to the English-speaking world.REVIEW: I really liked Seifert’s later work. The early stuff seems to mostly be popular, workers’ song types of things. I guess they’re okay.But his later work has a lot of great things to say about death and female beauty (a little creepy since he was writing a lot of this stuff in his sixties and seventies, but whatever). A stanza that particularly stood out to me, especially given his place in Czech history: “Death soon will kick in my door / and enter. / With startled terror at that minute / I’ll catch my breath / and forget to breathe again.”

RECOMMENDED: Yes.

WHAT’S NEXT: Vicente Aleixandre as collected in A Longing for the Light